NJSIAA Hosts a Panel to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Title IX

The NJSIAA has spent much of the past year acknowledging the 50th Anniversary of Title IX, the landmark federal legislation which granted unprecedented educational and athletic opportunities for females.

The culminating event in that celebration took place on Sept. 18, when the NJSIAA hosted a very special event at the Westin Princeton at Forrestal Village. It was sponsored by the NFHS Foundation and NJ.com.

Each high school in the state was invited to send a student representative to take part in a brunch program which featured a panel discussion involving five former standout New Jersey female athletes, who’ve all used their sporting experience to become very successful in life.

The many girls in attendance not only learned from the discussion, they were also able to talk with the panelists before and after, and additionally participate in a question-and-answer portion of the program.

The panel was moderated by Dana O’Neil, a Senior Writer for The Athletic, who was a field hockey standout at South Hunterdon. The panelists were Val Ackerman, a three-sport great from Hopewell Valley High School who is now commissioner of the Big East Conference; Bonnie Bernstein, who before becoming a famous TV sports personality and executive was a champion gymnast at Howell; Joetta Clark Diggs, a four-time track Olympian and entrepreneur who starred at Columbia High School, and Cathy Rush, an Oakcrest High graduate who later coached the Immaculata College women’s basketball team into the sport’s first dynasty program in the 1970s.

The day began with remarks from Colleen Maguire, NJSIAA Executive Director who herself was a star athlete at South Hunterdon and is the first woman to lead the state association in its history. Jen Fleury, the athletic director at Villa Walsh Academy, gave a history of Title IX and examples of the opportunities it has brought women athletes over the past 50 years, and Joanne Dzama, the AD at Morristown-Beard, introduced the panel.

After that, O’Neil led an active discussion with the panelists where they opened up about their experiences, challenges that they’ve faced and ways in which they’ve achieved success. They also presented pointers for the attendees on how to embrace the opportunities in their own lives to become successful as they grow.

The tone for the two-hour program was set by Bernstein with one simple remark early in the discussion, when she noted a simple fact to the attendees: “We were you.”

The athletes definitely took notice.

“This was really awesome,” said Bridget Davis, senior swimmer from Union Catholic who is headed to the University of Connecticut. “I was very impressed by the panelists and I feel very inspired. I’m going to take this with me throughout my career because they said such special things. As women, they were so motivating and told us things that were so important to our future.”

One of the points stressed by the panelists to the students was the importance of using different opportunities they will be given to network themselves. Everyone on the panel had specific stories to tell in which they did exactly that.

Examples of networking even took place within the room. Davis and a couple of the other students will be attending Big East schools. They were each able to individually speak and introduce themselves to Ackerman, the commissioner of the conference. Other contacts with the panelists were made as well.

“I actually talked to Val,” Davis said. “I went up and introduced myself. She’s such an inspiration for women in sports. Being such a big voice for us, it’s important to hear and listen to her, and it was great to meet her.”

“This was really inspiring,” said Madison O’Brien, a senior field hockey athlete from South Plainfield. “I was pretty nervous coming here because it was going to be with a bunch of of people that I didn’t know. But I made a lot of friends with people with similar interests and it was really nice. I loved to hear from women who’ve gone through a lot, and to see them and hear them motivate us was special. Seeing that they were also all from New Jersey and went on to do big things was also very inspiring.”

The panel spoke about how opportunities for women in sports have evolved during their careers. When Rush attended Oakcrest in the early 1960s, the school actually dropped girls sports after her freshman year. While Ackerman (Virginia) and Clark Diggs (Tennessee) both received college scholarships in the days before the NCAA became involved in the governance of women’s sports in 1982, things like room and board and textbooks weren’t necessarily covered. Each had a story which modern-day athletes might not realize.

Read more from the NJSIAA.